I really like rice.When I was growing up in Oklahoma, I don’t ever remember having rice — Maysville, Oklahoma was the land of “meat and potatoes.” I guess my taste for rice developed because in a lot of the countries I’ve lived in, rice was a staple — pretty much at every meal.
While rice in this country often means “Uncle Ben’s” from the local Food Lion, there are many, many different types of rice. One of my favorites is sticky rice. It’s possible to get “sticky rice” around here, but it in no way compares to the the sticky rice from, say, Thailand.
But what I started out to write about today was an experience we had when living in Asia. A local employee that worked at the American Embassy invited us to dinner at his house one evening and served a rice and fish dish. The rice was kind of like wild rice, but it was reddish brown in color and had a nutty, sweet flavor. Neither of us had ever had rice that tasted like it before. We both commented on how good it was, and our friend gave us the local name to give to our maid so she could buy some for us. We gave the maid the name of the rice and asked her to buy some at the local market. But for some reason she didn’t get the rice. We asked again and she still didn’t get the rice. Finally, we questioned her as to why she hadn’t purchased the rice like we had asked. She finally admitted her reason. The rice, that we called red rice, in their language, translated to prisoner’s food. There seemed to be some unwritten rule that no respectable cook would buy it — didn’t matter how good or healthful it might be.
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